Tag Archives: lake

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Moraine Lake

March 22, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Moraine Lake shoreline in evening, Sequoia National Park

I have only been to this remote lake twice, but as I think back on it now it seems a special place. My two visits were separated by decades. The first was when I was in my twenties and one half of a young couple on our first very long Sierra pack trip, a trip that had us taking two weeks to cross the Sierra from west to east. When I think back to pack trips from so far back, I realize that I have forgotten many details but this lake remains. On the second visit I came here on a trip retracing that earlier trip, though this time with a larger group of friends who had not been here before. It takes me a solid four days of walking to get this place, and the route covers some spectacular country and takes me into and across some very high places.

That route, and the contrast between it and what I found at this lake may account for the special feelings I have for this place. Both times on this route, the first day was a hard one under a heavy, long distance backpack load. The second day is about the same length, but it ends with a moderate climb to a lake. Day three starts right out with a brutal climb up the walls of the cirque above the lake, then crosses a high pass, drops into timberline country, and descends mostly open terrain to a camp where the trees grow thicker. Then on the fourth day things ease up. Much of the trail is though Sierra high country forest, mixed with open views, and then it leaves the main trail and takes a lateral out through more forest to this lake. I recall an expansive area of open forest along the shoreline, a shallow and pretty lake with forest on the other size, and a few peaks in the distance to catch the morning and evening light. From the right spots I could catch my first views of the summit of Mount Whitney, where I would stand a week or more later. And from this second trip I recall a slow and quiet evening with my hiking partners, hanging out in camp and sitting lazily on shoreline logs.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Lake and Peninsula

February 15, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Trees grow on a peninsula at a Yosemite subalpine lake, late summer

We have passed nearly halfway though our annual circuit around the sun since I made this photograph. It is now slightly past midwinter, and the photograph was made in late summer, a few weeks before the arrival of solar fall, though the signs of autumn were already everywhere in this drought-affected portion of the Sierra backcountry.

The haze in the atmosphere beyond the peninsula with its sunlit trees comes from wildfires that were burning all over Yosemite and the rest of the Sierra. One small one was burning just across a nearby ridge and a more distant but larger fire periodically fill the air with thick smoke. Wildfire smoke is a normal feature at the end of the season, but this year it was much worse than normal. Fortunately, every day the winds shifted, the smoke moved away, and we got some beautiful near-autumn weather — time to enjoy the golden-brown meadow grasses, walks around the lake, and the occasional climb up onto grants slabs that rose from its shoreline.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Tundra Swans

February 13, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A trio of tundra swans in flight in the Klamath Basin

I don’t usually do this, but I’m posting this photograph while I’m still in the field. It is a photograph I made earlier this evening, in the Klamath Basin in far Northern California — so far north in the state that I could look across the road and see Oregon. I’ve been photographing migratory birds in my “home range” of the California Central Valley for so long that I decided it was time to push out those boundaries a bit this season. I’ll share more about what this experience has taught me in a later post.

It is a challenge to photograph in a new place, especially when the subject is wildlife and double-especially when I arrived well after dark the previous night and had to head out again in pre-dawn darkness to find locations I’ve never been to before! Fortunately, I ended up in an area with quite a few birds — though not the dense flocks that I’m used to from some places I more frequently photograph. Here the main show involved a few golden eagles and a large number of tundra swans. I’ve only photographed tundra swans a few times in the past, since they are not all that plentiful in the places I usually visit. But here there were thousands of them, and I ended up photographing them in the morning and then again at the end of the day. From a distance grounded tundra swans look a lot like geese, though larger and with longer necks. Up close you notice that their bills are black, and they make rather different sounds that geese. Their flight patterns are not like geese either. The lumber into the air like jumbo jets loaded for intercontinental flights, gaining elevation very slowly and then flying in a smooth and level path.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Forest, Lake, and Haze

February 6, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A hazy late-summer day at a subalpine Sierra Nevada lake, Yosemite National Park

With all of the recent urban and street photography I have been posting — which is a bit seasonal pattern, given my travel tendencies — I’m also making an effort to go back through some older photographs from last year to find landscape photography that escaped my notice on the first pass. This always happens with photographs — for some reason certain images don’t make sense right after I make them, but when I come back to them later on with a fresh eye I see potential that I missed. Right now I’m revisiting late-summer photographs from a week-long backcountry stay at a Yosemite lake.

For me, this photograph holds many of the subtler elements of the High Sierra experience — not the spectacular grand vistas, but something deeper and ultimately perhaps more powerful. In this beautiful late-season time of year, the meadow grasses around this quiet lake have finished the wild growth phase of summer and have already turned golden-yellow in preparation for autumn and then winter. Lower angle light comes over the shoulder of the granite ridge whose base is visible beyond the trees. Widely spaced trees stand at the edges of the meadow and even trace weaknesses in the granite slabs on the higher slopes.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: lake

Moraine Lake

Lake and Peninsula

Tundra Swans

Forest, Lake, and Haze

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.